Artificial intelligence community to help fight COVID-19

MONTREAL – On May 12, several leaders in information technology and artificial intelligence development joined forces to enhance automated public chatbot service Chloe to support Canadians in the fight against the coronavirus.

The system aims to facilitate citizens’ rapid access to relevant information, and to enable healthcare system professionals to focus on tasks that require their expertise, while protecting the public and avoiding misinformation.

This open source project is available on covid19.dialogue.co and will be finalized in June 2020.

According to a statement, the objective is to create a chatbot system that supports the public by providing current and verified information about COVID-19, providing clear answers to specific questions on the subject, assessing the symptoms, assisting individuals with questions about the testing phase, and monitoring people in self-isolation to keep track of their condition.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak in Canada, information has been changing day by day. 811 lines across the country are often overflowing, and an increasing number of people are turning to telemedicine for information or to consult a healthcare professional, while complying with containment guidelines.

It is essential to automate as many steps as possible in the patient’s journey, to provide a safe service and truthful, current and accurate information to patients, while optimizing the work of health professionals and the functioning of the healthcare system, according to a statement.

Here is the list of AI community partners who are contributing to this open source project:

• Amazon Web Services – cloud computing services – aws.amazon.com
• Dataperformers – data clustering – dataperformers.com
• Dialogue Technologies – adaptation of the chatbot Chloe for COVID-19 – dialogue.co
• Google – data translation, augmentation and semantic matching – google.com
• John Hopkins University – COVID-19 tweet collection – www.jhu.edu
• Mila – expertise in artificial intelligence – mila.quebec
• Nu Echo – intelligent conversational automation solution – nuecho.com
• Samasource – data annotation – samasource.com
• Scale AI (one of Canada’s superclusters) – financial partner of the project – scaleai.ca